Dominik Kovac

Universal smart energy communication platform

Online data collection is crucial for increasing efficiency of energy consumption and reducing environmental impacts. Moreover, utility market liberalization and parallel EC requirements on smart measurement brought new challenges for utility and telecommunication providers. More Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks have been proposed with not clear widely accepted solution. Our study investigates feasibility of cost efficient measurement architecture based on already deployed network and home access technologies. Developed system running on the smart home gateway acts as a multi purpose enabler providing a real time smart meter data collection and visualization, but can be used for any home automation services as well.

Implementation of True IoT Vision

Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to become a driver in an emerging era of interconnected world through the advanced connectivity of smart devices, systems, and services. IoT goes beyond a broad range of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication technologies and covers a wide variety of networking protocols. There exist solutions like MQTT or SIP collecting data from sensors, CoAP for constrained devices and networks, or XMPP for interconnecting devices and people. Also there is a plethora of standards and frameworks (OSGi, AllJoyn) bringing closer the paradigm of IoT vision. However, the main constraint of most existing platforms is their limited mutual interoperability. To this end, we provide a comprehensive description of protocols suitable to support the IoT vision. Further, we advocate an alternative approach to already known principles and employ the SIP protocol as a container for M2M data. We provide description of data structures and practical implementation principles of the proposed structures (JSON and Protocol Buffers are discussed in detail) transmitted by SIP as a promising enabler for efficient M2M communication in the IoT world. Our reported findings are based on extensive hands-on experience collected after the development of advanced M2M smart home gateway in cooperation with the operator Telekom Austria Group.

IP home gateway as universal multi-purpose enabler for smart home services

There are many candidates for a communication infrastructure between the smart home gateway and service providers, distribution centers or end-users accessing smart home applications remotely. Optimally the access technology should be already deployed in order to minimize initial investments and in parallel must provide sufficient reliability and security even for critical applications. Therefore, we focused at already deployed platforms which have a strong potential to become the key communication technologies for smart home domain. Furthermore, we investigated the applicability of residential gateway access technology for emerging home automation services. Finally, we developed and demonstrate a middleware solution enabling the “state of technology” IP-based home gateway to serve as a universal multi-purpose enabler for connected home automation systems like alarm systems, smart metering and grid, photo-voltaic energy production systems, etc.ZusammenfassungEs gibt eine Reihe von Möglichkeiten, eine Kommunikationsinfrastruktur zwischen einem Smart Home Gateway, Dienstleistungsanbietern und Verteilnetzbetreibern einzurichten, die gleichzeitig auch den Endbenutzern den Fernzugriff auf Smart Home-Anwendungen erlaubt. Die bevorzugte Zugangstechnologie sollte jedoch idealerweise schon weit verbreitet und verfügbar sein, um Anfangsinvestitionen zu minimieren, und muss parallel dazu auch noch für kritischen Anwendungen ausreichende Zuverlässigkeit und Sicherheit aufweisen. Daher wurde in diesem Beitrag ausschließlich auf bereits in Betrieb befindliche Plattformen mit hohem Potenzial als Schlüsseltechnologien für Smart Home-Kommunikation fokussiert. Darüber hinaus galt es, die technologische Eignung des so genannten „Residential Internet Gateway“ für neue Home Automation-Dienstleistungen zu untersuchen. Letztendlich kann anhand einer konkret entwickelten Middleware-Lösung aufgezeigt werden, dass handelsübliche IP-basierte Internet-Home-Router durchaus nutzbringend als universelle Mehrzweck-Gateways für die Vernetzung und Steuerung von Hausautomationssystemen wie Alarmanlagen, Smart Metering, Smart Grid-Boxen und Photovoltaikanlagen eingesetzt werden können.

M2M gateway: The centerpiece of future home

The online collection of information about the consumption of gas, water, electricity and data from other sensors as temperature and humidity sensors or photo-voltaic systems became highly required. At the same time, the market liberalization on smart metering brought new challenges for utility distributors and telecommunication operators. Likewise, online data collection is crucial for increasing efficiency of energy consumption and reducing environmental impact as well. The communication concept which is able to fulfil mentioned requirements is called Internet of Things or Machine-to-Machine. During these days many industry bodies are trying to take a piece of this M2M cake, especially in a home environment. Since such an intelligent house is equipped by many different sensors and home automation systems, it is important to come up with a solution which will be able orchestrate all elements and provide end-users with one single management interface. The smart home gateway is one of possible solutions which enables the communication with various types of devices /sensors and provides common networking features like residential IP router as well. This paper demonstrates the concept of our smart home gateway which acts as a multipurpose enabler and communicates information from connected sensors to the end user through the developed middleware application. Since it is expected that the number of sensors in smart homes will be enormous it is appropriate to optimize the transmission of generated data between sensors and user applications. Therefore, our gateway implements a data aggregation scheme and respects the requirements defined by Home Gateway Initiative.

Performance analysis of the OSGi-based IoT frameworks on restricted devices as enablers for connected-home

The connected-home ecosystem is currently one of the highly discussed applications of Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Usually, this scenario is based on a center-point (so called smart home gateway) which provides the bridging connectivity inside (with the sensors) and outside (with the remote applications) the home. Such gateway is usually a restricted device running on Linux-based operating system (e.g. OpenWRT) including required applications on the top of it. In this paper, we focus on OSGi framework as currently very preferable platform for IoT services in combination with Raspberry Pi embedded hardware board which is also very popular for assuring the gateway features in the smart home. The performance analysis of three selected OSGi frameworks is provided with the aim to critically evaluate the most suitable candidate to become a solid enabler for the connected-home. Since HTTP is the most frequently applied communication protocol for data exchange between smart home gateway and any remote (cloud) application, a particular focus is given to the testing of three implementations of HTTP servers running as OSGi bundles on the gateway. All the obtained results including practical outputs are concluded at the end of our paper.

Keeping eyes on your home: Open-source network monitoring center for mobile devices

As the Internet continues to grow; it becomes more and more obvious that the communication network and its nodes play an increasingly important role. The traditional network management tools just monitor basic activity of network devices, but there is a common need for more complex solution including a mobile interface providing users with a convenient remote monitoring. Since the Internet of Things concept relays on the smart home gateway as a key component interacting with all sensors and appliances deployed within a building the network monitoring is not interesting only for network operators or companies. Also common end users want to have their intelligent households under a continuous control and be informed about specific events. Considering that and aiming at the monitoring and management of network components, we proposed a solution which is running on Raspberry Pi device with the support of openHAB platform and is able to monitor system resources and network activity of different network nodes. As key communication protocols we are utilizing SNMP and HTTP. Our developed system provides end-users with a very comfortable interface running on mobile devices or within any web browser. Proposed solution is completely open-source and can be easily ported to any other industry platform or extended by any additional feature or 3rd party application.

Remote management of intelligent devices: Using TR-069 protocol in IoT

The aggressive expansion of emerging smart devices connected to the Internet infrastructure is nowadays considered as one of the most challenging components of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision. As a particular segment of IoT, the smart home gateways, also named Machine-Type Communication Gateway (MTCG), become an important direction for industry including telecommunication operators. In most cases, the MTCG acts as a bridge between connected smart objects and the public network (Internet). As a consequence of the IoT domain expansion, the separate configuration of each individual Machine-to-Machine (M2M) device is not feasible anymore due to steadily growing numbers of M2M nodes. To perform this task, several novel technologies have recently been introduced. However, legacy protocols and mechanisms for remote network management still retain a certain application potential for IoT. Accordingly, we have investigated the well-known protocol TR-069 with a particular focus on its usability for MTCG. To this end, the software module (bundle) based on the TR-069 for remote configuration and management of MTCG, as well as for controlling the end smart devices, has been developed. We believe that our implementation (available as open source on GitHub) can serve as an important building block for efficient management of future IoT devices. Therefore, TR-069 protocol constitutes a proven and standardized technology and could be easily deployed by most of the network and service providers today.

QoS support in routing protocols for MANET

This paper deals with the characteristics of mobile ad-hoc networks and the issue of quality of service assurance in these networks. The work is focused mainly on the routing protocol AODV and its ability to provide different processing probabilities for different types of network traffic. Firstly, the development of the MANET simulation model and implementation of AODV protocol are described. The Network Simulator 3 was used as the key software tool for this purpose. The analysis of the efficiency of QoS mechanism implemented into AODV protocol and the final evaluation are posted at the end of this paper.

Objective video quality assessment methods: Video encoders comparison

This paper mainly deals with an evaluation of video codecs used in todays applications. The paper begins with a short introduction to video quality evaluation methods. It is focuses on the objective measurement methods including Peak to Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity (SSIM), and Mean-Singular Value Decomposition (M-SVD). Then, four different video sequences are chosen to evaluate four video codecs, concretely H.264, VP8 concretely Dirac, Flash, VP8 and H.264. These codecs were tested on application developed in C++ wit FFmpeg implementation. The graphs at the end of this paper show the results of the tests in detail.

On predicting video quality expectations of mobile users

Mobile network operators are currently seeking for simple but accurate methods to predict the levels of satisfaction for their customers using the on-line multimedia applications, such as YouTube. Even though the ultimate user demands are known to be influenced by multiple factors, there is one clear trend - people require an increasingly higher quality of mobile video services. To this end, modeling the corresponding quality of experience (QoE) constitutes a non-trivial task and calls for a careful balance between the key underlying aspects, while maintaining the overall complexity as low as possible. This should in turn deliver the much needed usability of the resulting model across many real-world scenarios, and in this work we develop a novel QoE prediction model based on our extensive user experience investigation of the YouTube service. Our proposed solution allows network operators to estimate the degrees of video quality and thus predict the associated mobile user expectations in their deployments. The design principles behind our methodology, its accuracy evaluation, as well as the obtained numerical results are reported in the course of this paper.